“They’re on a clean track inbound,” she pointed out, gesturing toward the curving trajectory of the dark ships. “Unless they alter vectors, the next thing they encounter will be our defensive screen.”
“A defensive screen that I’ll start converging on their tracks when they’re a lot closer.” Any move he made now would be too easily countered by the dark ships.
He had always hated this part of space combat, just like every other fleet sailor. The enemy was in sight for days, with attack runs sometimes lasting for several hours or more before contact occurred. Human instincts formed on the surface of a single planet could never be comfortable with the idea that an enemy you could see charging you was not an immediate threat. It would never feel right to set up your own attack run, then go to the mess decks to eat before catching several hours of sleep, knowing the enemy would not be in range until long after that. Half the trick of handling space combat was learning how to deal with the many ways in which humans had trouble handling space.
This time was particularly bad because physics made it unlikely that he could intercept the dark ships until just slightly too late. He could accelerate his ships to cover the distance faster, but then would have to decelerate them to ensure he could actually hit the dark ships when he caught them. The time saved just wasn’t enough, the distances just too large. But he would have to watch, hour by hour, as his ships could not quite get where they needed to be in time.
We’ll never really be at home in space, Geary thought as he lay down on the bunk in his stateroom, gazing up at the slight imperfections in the overhead that had grown comfortingly familiar in the months since he had been awakened from survival sleep to discover that a century had passed in what for him was the blink of an eye. He had spent a career in the Alliance fleet at peace, only to reawaken to a fleet and an Alliance staggering from a century of war. Since then, he had fought battle after battle, some against alien species unknown to humanity a short time before, but it seemed like most of his battles had been against his fellow humans. Not always combat, but battles over who was in charge and what to do and whom to trust and what to believe.
But now the fight was against something that didn’t care about any of that. Artificial intelligences who just did what their programming told them to do even if that programming was compromised or glitched or riddled with bugs.
No, that wasn’t right. The fight wasn’t just against the AIs running the dark ships. It was against the people who were more willing to trust artificial-intelligence routines than they were their fellow humans, who thought the right solutions could only be found through keeping secrets and making decisions that no one else was told about. The Alliance could survive the dark ships. But the Alliance could not survive if people stopped believing in the ideas that made the Alliance what it was.
He had beaten the dark ships once. Could he also beat the mind-sets of the people who had ordered those ships built?
“They’re still coming in on a direct trajectory,” Desjani told him as Geary took his seat again on the bridge of Dauntless. “Very Black Jack in their tactics.”
“Should I be flattered?” He studied the flat curve of the projected track for the dark ships, running through the center of his loose defensive screen and on toward an intercept with Ambaru. With the dark ships diving in toward the star that Ambaru Station orbited at a distance of about eight light-minutes, Geary’s battle cruisers coming in on an intercept from the side had managed to close the distance a great deal. Relative to Geary, the dark ship formation was to port and slightly behind, almost exactly thirty light-minutes distant. The defensive screen ahead of them was formed into a flattened oval facing the dark ships and orbiting to maintain a steady position relative to them. That screen was only twenty-two light-minutes away. If none of the ships changed their trajectories, the dark ships would go through the screen at nearly right angles, while Geary’s battle cruisers would meet the screen at an angle as they continued to close the distance on the dark ships. Five light-minutes closer to the star and Ambaru Station than the defensive screen was the secondary blocking force, sixteen of Geary’s heavy cruisers formed into two blocks of eight each. “I’ve punched through enemy formations before, so that’s consistent if they’re programmed to follow my examples.”
“You can’t tighten the screen down much,” Desjani commented. “The dark ships are so much more maneuverable that they could just swing around an edge if you do.” She gestured at her display. “They’re going to try for Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution.”
“You think they’re just going to target three of the battleships?” Geary asked. “Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution are closest to the center of the defensive screen, where the dark ships are aiming for. But the dark ships have enough maneuverability to aim for other battleships as well.”
“They do,” she agreed. “Now, think like a computer. Calculate probabilities. The dark ships could have run a hundred thousand simulations of their upcoming encounter with that screen by now without overheating a single circuit. The dark destroyers have to be low on fuel. The heavy cruiser will be better off, so they’ll save it for their encounter with our heavy cruisers. But they’ll burn off all five of their destroyers. A single destroyer targeting a single battleship will have a certain chance of getting through to its objective, especially if it accelerates to a velocity fast enough to produce a serious problem for our fire control. But it won’t be a hundred percent chance of a kill. Even if all of our shots miss, if the destroyers are going fast enough to mess up our fire control, they’ll also be going fast enough to complicate attempts to ram. Even a battleship is pretty tiny compared to the space around it.”
He nodded, understanding where she was going with this. “If I had to make a wild guess based on my experience, I’d say maybe a fifty percent chance of a big enough piece of the destroyer getting through the defensive fire and striking the battleship.”
“And if it’s two destroyers targeting each battleship?”
“Pretty near certain, I’d guess.” He hunched forward, studying the situation again. “We need to start hitting them as far from the battleships as possible, but the farther ahead of the battleships our destroyers are, the more likely that they’ll get chopped up by the dark battle cruisers.”
“What would Admiral Geary do?” she asked.
He moved one hand to trace the movements of ships. “Send out several formations of destroyers and light cruisers to hit the flanks of the dark ships as they approach the defensive screen. I’d try to take out as many of the dark destroyers as possible before they reached the screen, and maybe cripple or destroy the heavy cruiser. So the dark ships will expect me to do that.” An idea came to him, causing his lips to form a cold smile. “But if those dark destroyers are going to accelerate to hit our battleships…”
Desjani smiled back. “Yeah.”
“Let’s set this up, Captain.”
There was an undeniable sense of satisfaction in using the computer systems aboard Dauntless to swiftly come up with plans that would hopefully trip up the plans developed by the computer systems on the dark ships. Looking over the plan carefully, Geary nodded. “Captain Desjani, I need to talk to the battleship captains in the screen as well as the commanders of the destroyer and light-cruiser divisions.”
Desjani gestured to the comm watch-stander, who hastily put together the conference message. “Ready, Captain. Circuit three.”